Ride or Die

by Solomon Jones

  Keisha could hear in his voice that he was serious.

  “Why would you do that?” she asked, hoping he would give her the answer that she wanted.

  Jamal’s eyes took on a faraway look as he tried to find the right words.

  “My mother hated me ‘cause I was too much like my father,” he whispered. “My father couldn’t love me ’cause he ain’t know how. So if I gotta choose between love and hate—between them and you—I’m takin’ you, and I ain’t lookin’ back.”

  He took her chin in his hand and turned her face toward his own.

  “I’m makin’ my choice, Keisha,” he said earnestly. “I need to know if you gon’ make yours, too.”

  There was a lull in the shooting, and John Anderson felt like he was in the midst of a dream.

  As the police officers’ hands guided him away from the car where he’d given his speech and he listened to the garbled sounds of shouting voices all around him, he could feel that he was in the eye of a storm. And it was troubling, because he knew in his spirit that the thunder and lightning were about to begin anew.

  Earlier, he had come there in the belief that trouble was what he wanted. But he wasn’t so sure anymore. He was, after all, a man of peace, he thought as the officers pushed him through the crowd. But as the moments stretched out, allowing him to see things clearly through the mounting confusion, he realized that he hadn’t known peace in forty years.

  As he absorbed the various sights around him—a woman running with a baby, an injured man lying on the asphalt, one car crushed against another, police officers shouting into radios—he saw the same type of confusion that often raged in his mind.

  Thoughts from his past cropped up on a regular basis, challenging the very essence of who he was. These were the thoughts that mocked him for the sermons he preached, and the service he rendered, and the faith he claimed to hold dear.

  These thoughts grew into action. And every day, they caused him to fail when his faith was tested. There were tests of the flesh, and tests of his convictions, tests that repeatedly showed that he, like any man, was driven by his desires.

  But while other preachers proclaimed that their desires were in line with God’s, John Anderson knew that the desires that drove him were anything but godly. They were sometimes downright wicked. And if he’d learned anything on this day, it was that wicked desires bred wicked results.

  The police moved him past the car, too slowly it seemed, in an effort to get him away before the shooting resumed.

  When it did, John turned, and for the first time recognized the police commissioner on his right.

  But as John opened his mouth to shout a warning, the sound of his voice was swallowed up by the thud of a bullet, smacking against flesh like the sound of wood against bone.

  John watched the police commissioner fall to the ground in a heap, and in the next moment John was pushed down next to him.

  As he lay there, behind the open door of a police car, he prayed that there would be no more death today.

  Keisha sat on the couch and stared across it into the face of the man she’d fallen in love with as a child. It was a face that had matured over the years.

  But the boy she’d known was still there, in that face. He lived in those smoldering eyes. She could see him still, staring at her across the playground and speaking without words.

  He was saying that the dreams they’d shared as children were going to live or die based upon what happened in the next few moments. There would be no more playground sunsets or secret kisses. There would be no more childhood laughter or shared innocence.

  Right here, right now, in the dank air of a basement, Keisha would have to make a choice that only a woman could. And she didn’t know if she was ready for that.

  “What you thinkin’ about?” Jamal asked.

  “I’m thinking about the freedom I told you I wanted,” she said thoughtfully. “And I’m wondering why it doesn’t seem that important now.”

  “Maybe you just scared,” he said, taking her hand in his.

  Keisha looked up into his face. “Why would I be afraid?”

  “‘Cause now you gotta do more than just talk about bein’ free. You gotta decide if you really want to.”

  “Suppose I’m not ready to decide now?”

  “Then I guess you already made your decision,” Jamal said sadly.

  Keisha wasn’t sure what she wanted. But she knew what she didn’t want. She didn’t want to watch her parents’ marriage break under the weight of the ministry. She didn’t want to spend the rest of her life wondering what could have been. And most of all, she didn’t want to lose Jamal.

  “Why can’t we just stay here and be together?” she said with upturned eyes.

  “’Cause people who don’t follow my father’s orders don’t live long.”

  “Where will you go?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, stroking her hair.

  Keisha looked straight ahead and spoke, almost to herself. “How can you live your life, knowing your own father would want to kill you?”

  “How can you live in a place where they talk about love, but you never see it?” Jamal retorted.

  “How do you know what I see?” she asked saucily.

  “’Cause if you saw love, you wouldn’t be tryin’ to get it from me,” Jamal said, matching her tone.

  “If you loved me, you wouldn’t talk about my family that way,” Keisha said.

  “This ain’t about our families, Keisha. It’s about us.”

  Jamal got up slowly from the couch and walked across the basement floor.

  “But since you want to make it about families, let me tell you ’bout mine,” he said quietly.

  He paused to allow his mind to unlock the memories.

  “My mom was a college girl—a good girl who met my pop one night in a club. He told her he was a businessman. She believed him.

  “They dated for a minute, and when he got her pregnant, she found out what his business really was. She hated him for how he made his livin’, and she made sure I ain’t see him, ’cause she ain’t want me to turn out like him. Problem was, she hated me, just like she hated him.”

  “That summer I spent comin’ down here to see you? I had to sneak down here, ’cause I knew she ain’t want me nowhere near my pop.

  “When she heard what I was doing’, she sent me down South. When that ain’t work, she bought me back home. When I got popped the second time for hustlin’, she told me what her eyes had told me all my life. She said I wasn’t shit. She said, if I wanted to be like my father, I could go ’head and do that. Then she put me out her house, and told me to forget I was her son.”

  Jamal turned and faced Keisha, and she thought she could see the reflection of his tears.

  “You ask me how I know you don’t see no love?” he said quietly. “I know, ’cause I can see it in your eyes. They look just like mine.”

  Keisha got up from the couch and threw her arms around his neck. He wrapped his arms around her waist, and the two of them hugged one another in an effort to squeeze away their pain.

  Keisha kissed Jamal’s cheek, released her embrace, and turned away from him.

  “I want to be with you, Jamal,” she said, biting her lip. “But there’s so much I want to do with my life. I’ve been working with this lady at my job who says I have a good eye, and I could probably work in fashion.”

  She turned to him. “I want to do that, Jamal. I want to see the world. I want to make a mark.”

  “And you can’t do that with me?” he said with resentment.

  “Haven’t you ever wanted anything, Jamal?”

  “Yeah,” he said, his voice cracking. “I wanted you.”

  The words struck her like lightning, making her forget everything that had come before.

  And when she looked into his eyes and saw the depth of his love for her, she knew that her decision had been made. Yes, she wanted the freedom to choose her own path. Yes, she wanted the chance t
o succeed. But more than any of that, she wanted love. And she knew that she would get that from Jamal.

  She kissed him gently on the lips. “I want you, too,” she said tenderly.

  Placing her palms against his face, she put her lips against his ear.

  “Tell me what I need to do to come with you.”

  In the quiet, damp air of the basement, Jamal sat her down on the couch, and began to lay out the plan of escape he’d been formulating since the night before.

  “I’ma have to act like I snatched you like my pop told me to.”

  He pulled back his shirt to reveal the gun he was carrying in his waistband. “I’ma have to use this.”

  She looked at him with a question in her eyes, and he took her hand in an effort to answer it.

  “Touch it,” he said, guiding her fingers to the barrel of the gun.

  She did, and at once felt something awaken deep inside of her. It was an excitement that was almost sexual.

  Her lips parted slightly, and her mouth watered with anticipation. She was finally going to taste the world she’d always seen around her—a world that was reflected in the dim light that played upon the gun’s gray steel.

  “I’ma carry this gun,” he said with a sly smile playing on his lips. “But I want you to know my gun belong to you.”

  Keisha felt herself blush at the underlying message.

  “I want you to understand somethin’ else, too,” he said, stroking her cheek.

  “What’s that?”

  “No matter what happen in the next few hours, no matter what it look like I’m doin’, I want you to understand that I love you. And I would never let nothin’ happen to you.”

  She placed her hand against his, and guided it along her face. “I know.”

  Jamal kissed her tenderly. Then he pulled out a cell phone and called one of his father’s people to say he had the girl.

  As he spoke, Keisha could hear the shooting outside begin anew. The sound of the bullets made her feel alive.

  Lynch crouched behind the car where Reverend Anderson had stood and listened to the high-pitched whine of bullets as they ricocheted off nearby parked cars. From where he was kneeling, it was hard to tell whom the gunman was targeting, or if he was aiming at all.

  He knew that the shooter was on a rooftop, and that it was his job to remove him.

  He watched as panicked protesters ran one block east and charged onto Philadelphia’s main thoroughfare, Broad Street, stumbling into rush-hour traffic.

  He saw cars swerve and crash to avoid fleeing people as screams pierced the air and bodies were flung skyward. And when the crumpled wrecks had filled the intersection and the injured lay moaning in agony, he watched traffic back up in all directions, leaving the crowd trapped between twisted metal and flying lead.

  As the gunfire continued, residents of the block shut their doors and huddled inside. Police were pinned down near their vehicles. Children cried for their mothers. Husbands called to their wives. And Lynch jumped out from behind the car where he’d been hiding. He ran full speed toward an alley on the north side of the street.

  Once there, he pulled his weapon and looked down the alley to see if there was clear passage to the other side. But he couldn’t see anything beyond the weeds and trash in front of him.

  “Dan two-five!” he yelled into his handheld radio. “Get me some more units on Dauphin Street!”

  The sound of sirens filled the air in response to his call. But even if backup could get there, they’d have to abandon their vehicles and make their way to Dauphin Street on foot.

  Lynch didn’t have time to wait for that.

  Holstering his gun, he covered his face with his arm to shield himself from the tear-shaped leaves that whipped back at him as he pushed through the trash-strewn alley.

  As he passed through, he peered to his right, through the man-sized weeds, and saw children staring out at him from a kitchen window. Their faces were etched with the same emotion that pervaded the nearby streets—fear.

  Just across from them, on the other side of the alley, he found what he was looking for. Removing his gun from its holster, he stepped over knee-high trash and pushed through a dry-rotted wooden gate to an abandoned house.

  The back door was gone, so he stepped through the opening and thrust his hand out in front of him, feeling his way through the darkness and hoping that he wouldn’t fall through the creaking floor.

  He could smell the charred wood from the fire that had long ago gutted the building. He could feel the dampness from the water that had failed to save it. And as he made his way through the dining room and to the steps that led to the second floor of the three-story house, he felt something else that he couldn’t quite place.

  There was a hiss, a sudden rumbling, and something ran toward him, its claws scratching against the floor before it lunged at him. He ducked sideways and it flew past, landing a few feet behind him and running toward the back door.

  “Damn rats,” he muttered.

  Moving quickly up the staircase, he jogged to the second floor, then rounded the landing and skipped every other stair until he made it to the third.

  Tiptoeing through the hallway, he stepped over missing floorboards on his way to the back window, where he knelt down and listened to the gunshots outside.

  He quickly realized that he was just a few houses from the rooftop where the shooter was positioned.

  Lynch opened the window and slithered out to the roof. He lay flat, facing the direction of the shooter, whom he could see kneeling behind one of the century-old chimneys that topped the houses on the row.

  He was a dark-skinned man with dreadlocks, a muscular build, and a face that was fixed in an enraged expression. With each shot from the AK-47 that he held, his rage seemed to transform into a self-satisfied sneer.

  Lynch could see from his demeanor that he wasn’t shooting merely because someone had paid him to do it. No. This was personal.

  Lynch aimed his weapon and looked for a clear shot, but the chimney that stood between them prevented it.

  Then the shooter stopped to change the banana clip that held his bullets.

  Jumping to his feet, Lynch leaped over a large hole in the burned-out roof, charged full speed across the forty feet that separated them, and unleashed a barrage from his semiautomatic pistol.

  The shooter didn’t stop to look for the source of the bullets. He merely ducked behind the chimney and hunkered down. In three seconds, Lynch was upon him.

  The shooter didn’t have the time to snap the new banana clip into his rifle. But he didn’t need it.

  Popping up from behind the chimney while clenching the barrel of the rifle, the shooter swung the butt and hit Lynch’s arm, knocking Lynch’s gun from his hand. Lynch fell down, and the shooter stood over him and swung the rifle again. This time he missed.

  Lynch rolled away and stood to his full six feet. He charged at the shooter, who ducked sideways, causing Lynch to tumble toward the chimney. He turned to avoid hitting the bricks headfirst, and there was a cracking sound as Lynch’s shoulder slammed into the chimney.

  The pain blurred his vision as he turned to face his adversary. Then the younger, more agile man grabbed the rifle again and swung it, hitting Lynch in his head.

  Lynch saw a flash of light and felt a warm liquid flow down the side of his face. He heard gunshots and approaching voices. And the last sound he heard before losing consciousness was the sound of footsteps running away.

  A minute later, Lynch heard words through a velvet haze, but was unable to respond.

  “Lieutenant,” a police officer said, kneeling over him.

  “Lieutenant Lynch!” the officer shouted, shaking his shoulder.

  The pain pierced Lynch’s body like an arrow and snatched him back from the fog that had enveloped him after he was struck with the rifle butt.

  “Where’s the shooter?” Lynch said, trying to sit up and wincing with the pain before two Fire Rescue workers arrived and told
him to stay down.

  “He’s gone,” the officer said. “But he couldn’t have gotten far.”

  “Is anyone hurt besides me?” Lynch asked, trying and failing to laugh, because the pain was just too great.

  The cop looked at the Fire Rescue workers, who looked down at Lynch and busied themselves treating his wounds, because they didn’t think it was their place to answer such a question.

  “I said, is anyone hurt?” Lynch asked, more forcefully.

  “A protestor was shot,” the officer said. “It looks like he’s gonna be okay.”

  “Thank God,” Lynch said. “It could’ve been a lot worse.”

  “There was one more,” the officer said, dejectedly looking down as he uttered the news.

  “Commissioner Freeman was hit. He’s dead.”

  4

  One minute after the guns fell silent, a thin veil of white smoke filled the air around Fifteenth and Dauphin, giving the street an otherworldly glow.

  Injured and frightened protesters, some bloodied and scarred, roamed the pothole-ridden asphalt, trying in vain to make sense of what they’d just witnessed. For a few moments, they all stumbled about in silence. Then a few of them began to call out to those who’d been lost in the mêlée. It was then that the street came back to life.

  Police commanders barked orders as uniformed officers arrested the men who’d emerged from the bar during the protest. Officers in black combat fatigues set up a staging area across the street from the bar.

  Those who’d been caught in the middle tried to regroup as well. Sobbing children ran to their mothers’ outstretched arms. Crouching protesters rose up from their hiding spaces. Cars began to navigate the maze of accidents that had brought Broad Street’s rush-hour traffic to a standstill.

  And then, as the smoke began to clear and the slowly spinning lights atop police and Fire Rescue vehicles swept over the frightened faces and century-old brick houses of Dauphin Street, camera- and microphone-wielding reporters rushed into the crowd.

  A cameraman from Channel 6 approached a group of scarf-bedecked young women whose curvaceous figures and world-weary eyes belied their tender ages. They giggled and jockeyed for position when they saw him, jumping at the chance to be on television.